Fabrice's weblog

This isn't my first post in 2008, but I'll still dedicate this post to wishing you a Happy New Year. May it be successful for your business, work, and family plans.

Yesterday, a developer asked in the LINQ in Action forum and in Microsoft's official LINQ forum how to write a LINQ to SQL query that would return random records from the database.

Did you know that depending on the way you rethrow exceptions you may lose important information? There are already several blog posts that explain and demonstrate the difference between throw and throw ex. I'm realizing only now that none of the two solutions yields the complete call stack trace information!

Way too often developers take the easy solution to use try..catch blocks to silence and ignore exceptions.

If for some reason you need to convert an ISBN-13 to ISBN-10 (one being that Amazon doesn't support ISBN-13 in product affiliate links) then you need not only to remove the first three characters. You also need to recompute the checksum.

LINQ in Action won't be available as a paper book before January, but the e-book is already available in preview, and of course .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 are there. This is why we are now able to publish the complete source code for all the samples included in the book (this includes updated source code for LINQ to Amazon). Feel free to download it even if you don't own the book (yet) and provide feedback in the book's forum.

Often, when you try to find out how to write the correct LINQ query you need, you end up being confused because it becomes too complex. In such situations, you should remember that the let clause is here to help you.

Did you know that a forum dedicated to LINQ in Action is available? It was already available from the book's web page at Manning, but we've just added a link to it in the top menu of this site so it can be found more easily. You can use this forum for posting comments about the book and for discussing about LINQ with the authors (Steve, Jim, and I).